


The Twins' Lullaby

by Beleriandings



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-19
Updated: 2013-09-19
Packaged: 2017-12-27 02:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/973002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three sets of twins, their lives all intertwined with the same melody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Twins' Lullaby

Maybe it was the cry that had woken him. Maybe he had not fallen asleep at all. These days his nights were never more than a haze of half-wakefulness, of formless foreboding and vague dark shapes in his peripheral vision. But if there was one thing that Maedhros was attuned to, it was the crying of a child. He had been the eldest, the protector of his six younger brothers. Even before their mother left. When her almost limitless patience wore thin, or their father was in one of his stormy black moods when he shut himself away for days on end, he had been the one to calm his younger brothers, to reassure them that their nightmares were not real, to dry their tears and give them a cup of hot milk and tell them stories until sleep came back to them.

It was a sound he had not heard for many years. He was still not used to living in a house with two children again. So much had changed, he and Maglor were not the same as they had been. Indeed, sometimes he thought he didn’t even know his brother anymore, or himself. But it seemed that young children would always wake up crying in the night and need comforting, whatever else happened in the world. Mechanically, Maedhros stood up in the dark, and opening the shutters. It was a windy night, small clouds darting across the moon, but there was enough light to strike a match and light the candle on the writing desk. By its light he shouldered open the door and padded quietly down the corridor to the room where the twins slept.

There was already a little light seeping from under the door, he noticed. And he could hear something, becoming more distinct as he drew closer. Quiet singing. He smiled wearily. Maglor must have got there first. He recognised the melody. It tugged at something deep in his memory, bringing a rush of emotion, of mingled joy and sadness and something else he couldn’t quite identify. He stood transfixed outside the slightly open door, the wax from the candle dripping onto his hand as memory came to him, vivid as if the events were playing out before his eyes.

 

_“Macalaurë, I swear, if you can sing a song that can make the twins go to sleep, then you might go some way towards putting your talent to good use for once!”_

_Maitimo knew the words would sting his younger brother’s pride. But he also knew that his mother could not carry on like this. The birth of his two youngest brothers, only a month ago, had sapped her strength, so much so that it frightened him. His mother, his fierce, bright mother who had once calmly presided over the household, kept their father from flying into a rage, and still found time to created lifelike beauty from inanimate pieces of marble. Today he had found her sobbing quietly in the twins’ room, trying to quiet their tearing cries. At first he was almost absurdly embarrassed. He had never seen her cry before, and found it a vaguely disturbing concept. But she palmed the tears from her eyes angrily, head up, back straight. He stayed with her, and they each held one of the twins, and they rocked them together, and they talked. She had been arguing with Fëanáro, that much Maitimo did not need to be told. Of course she had, he thought. Lately their arguments had become louder, more frequent, and less quickly forgiven. And the twins cried and cried, and carried on crying, despite the best efforts of their mother and brother._

_So when Macalaurë had appeared at the door, the resignation of the underappreciated artist clear on his face, asking what was going on, Maitimo had snapped at him. He regretted it almost instantly, seeing the hurt and confusion in his brother’s eyes._

_“I’m sorry Macalaurë, I just… mother… the twins…” he gestured limply, his voice cracking._

_Nerdanel smiled grimly, an amused glitter starting to return to her eyes._

_“Now there is a challenge for a young musical genius such as yourself. Macalaurë, if you can write a song that will make your brothers stop crying, I will be truly convinced that you are the greatest musician this world has ever seen, or ever will.”_

_The relief was obvious on Maitimo’s face. The twins may still be crying, but if their mother’s sense of humour was coming back, then maybe things were returning to some semblance of normality._

_But Macalaurë only smiled serenely, and left the room. Soon enough he was back, bearing his harp and a few hastily scribbled staves of music, fingers ink-stained._

_Without another word, he sat down on the ground, legs crossed, and began to sing._

_The melody was haunting, it twisted in elaborate curlicues and leaps. It had no words, (Maitimo, if he had been thinking anything at all, would have supposed that Macalaurë had become so involved with the melody that he had simply forgotten to write any) but it didn’t need them. Macalaurë’s voice could take the simplest vowel sounds and weave them into a river of molten gold, as deftly as Fëanáro could pour and shape real metal. The melody had a rich, romantic air, but, Maitimo thought, it didn’t sound quite like a lullaby. Too sad. Macalaurë had been going through a phase of melodramatic tragedy, in which everything he wrote was tinged with the flavour of the saddest of all of the great stories, of lost love and shipwrecks and the tears of tormented souls._

 

(How little they had known of tragedy and tears then, thought Maedhros bitterly.)

 

_But it was undeniably lovely. And, improbably, miraculously, the twins fell silent. Four pairs of wide eyes watched Macalaurë sing, accompanying himself on the harp. Only when he had finished did Maitimo and Nerdanel blink and realise that both twins had fallen asleep._

_Nerdanel smiled. “Thank you Macalaurë,” she said falteringly, “that was…”_

_She didn’t need to say anything else._

Maglor’s voice had a different quality to it now. He spoke relatively little these days, and seldom sang at all. Instead of bright liquid gold, it now had the dark grandeur of richly polished brass. It was the same melody, but there were words now. Each one was sharp pain in Maedhros’s chest, but still he stood there, still as one of his mother’s works of carved stone. Listening.

“The west wind bore our ships across the sea  
Each boy must one day leave his mother’s side  
We thought perhaps beyond we would be free  
And there we could pretend that none had died.

But soon enough our rights had turned to wrongs  
Our father lost; our dreams in ash and dust  
Our deeds would not be spoken of in songs  
To stay alive one must do what one must.

But let us now sing songs of better things,  
The world rolls on, and children still must sleep  
And tales can wait, of grief and fallen kings  
So wrap yourselves in dreams both wide and deep.

And know at least the sun will rise tomorrow  
Until then, sleep; be free of fear and sorrow.”

Maedhros listened until he could bear it no longer, suddenly finding himself angrily blinking back old tears. Things had changed, a different set of twins, a world away. But it was the same. Frustration and grief flared suddenly within him, a visceral, unexpected onrush on emotion such as he had not felt in a long time, that he had painstakingly locked away, just to allow himself to survive each day. How dare he, he thought. Our brothers… all of our brothers… he shoved the door open roughly, ready to shout, to wake the children, to break the calm that had descended on the house. But as he entered, Maglor’s head flicked around, meeting his eyes. He stopped singing.

Elros and Elrond were lying on the bed, curled together under a thick fur blanket, fast asleep. Elros’s hand clutched the edge of the pillow, and his small bare foot was sticking out from under the cover. Elrond was sucking his thumb, thick dark hair falling over his pale face. Maglor sat on the floor at the foot of the bed. He didn’t have his harp this time. He was dressed in the clothes he had worn the day before. Had he not slept? Maedhros wondered. And, as quickly and unexpectedly as it had come, all of his anger seemed to melt away at that moment, leaving only a deep, hollow sadness. The brothers held each other’s gaze for a long time, a current of something unspoken passing between them. Finally Maedhros sighed, set the candle on the table and went to the bed, wordlessly tucking the blanket around Elros’s bare foot.

“You finally wrote the words.”

It was not a question.

“Yes.”

There was nothing more to say. Maedhros turned around and went to sit down next to Maglor, their backs against the cold wall, legs outstretched side by side. Both lost in their own thoughts. They stayed like that for a long while, watching over the children until the first rays of the pale morning sunlight began to slice through the gap in the curtains.

————-

_Elrond was running. Flames licked about his peripheral vision as he stumbled on the steep rocky path along the ridge down into the valley. His valley, his beautiful Imladris, was burning. The slender trees crackled and blazed, the fragile house where his little family slept was flaring like kindling. His vision blurred. He was too far away, the path too winding. If he could only make it in time to save them… Celebrian was there, and Elladan and Elrohir. There were dark shapes, figures running, holding torches, setting the fires. Suddenly he became aware that he too was holding a burning brand. Had it been him? Had he set the fire? But no, that was someone else’s story, he thought distractedly. But whose? He looked at his hands again. The two rings were gone. Where were they? Had he lost them? A tall, hooded figure blocked the path in front of him, silhouetted against the flames. He couldn’t see the face, but he could hear a voice. No, that wasn’t right, the voice did not come from the figure, but from the very air around him, sometimes whispering words, sometimes singing little snatches of rhyme. To Elrond’s slight surprise it did not seem a threatening voice. So he ignored it, and concentrated on the figure in front of him, which was lowering its hood. He didn’t want to see what was underneath. But the face was that of Elros. Or was it? The features seemed to shift and change, becoming Gil-Galad, then Isildur, then Maedhros, then Maglor, then… himself. It kept changing, never keeping the same face. Elrond stared as the figure looked into the sky. There, through a gap in the fire-lit smoke, he could see a bright star, burning silver against the blackness. He looked blankly, thinking that it should give him hope. But all he felt was a great, echoing emptiness. And fear. The figure suddenly shrugged back its dark cloak, and in its arms were his two infant sons. The hands, one of them missing a finger, turned to claws, the eyes suddenly flaring with a hot glow that was not a reflection of the flames. The pupils were catlike slits. But suddenly there was something else, that whispering voice on the air again. It began a song, a song with no words, slow and sad, but somehow… calming. Healing. The melody twisted around him, rooting him to the spot. What did it remind him of? He tried to catch hold of it, to place the tune, but it was too late, the world was fading around him, images dissolving in front of his eyes in a swirl of stars and fire…_

He awoke with his legs tangled in the sheet, momentarily frozen and disorientated. A dream, he thought. Just a dream. He turned over, his eyes falling on Celebrian, still sleeping peacefully beside him in the cold grey light before the dawn. He gently brushed aside a lock of her silver hair that had fallen across her face, the very motion calming him. He raised his hand, inspecting the two rings on his second and fourth fingers. Vilya, the ring of sapphire, and his wedding ring. He never took either off. The memory of the dream was still bright and terrible in his mind, but the pounding fear was starting to ebb a little. Just the worries of a new father, he thought. It was only natural, his sons had come into the world and brought with them many of his old anxieties. It was only natural, when he had already lost so many people. But Imaldris was a place of peace, a safe refuge for his new family and for any of his torn and scattered kindred that needed one. He would not let himself lose hope in that particular dream.

That melody though… it was still looping around his mind. What was it? It was something from his childhood, he felt sure, something Maglor used to sing. More to distract himself than anything else, he got up and went to the writing desk in the adjoining room, pulling out a fresh sheet of paper. He remembered Maglor telling him to practice writing down a melody by ear. Elrond had always loved music, and had more talent for it than Elros. He had practiced and practiced, for many years wanting nothing more than for music to come as naturally to him as it did to Maglor, as easily as speaking. For a while he had got into the habit of writing down melodies he heard in his dreams, of teasing them out into his waking mind before they could escape him. He had not done so for many years, but now he started to write down the tune from the dream, humming slightly under his breath as he did so.

As he worked, he began to remember. It had had words. They came back to him, little by little, and as he wrote them down it was as though he was hearing them again for the first time. As a child he had thought it just a pretty lullaby, if a rather sad one, if he had considered it at all. But now… he thought back to Maglor. What had he been thinking when he had written those words? Elrond didn’t know. He had never really known what to think of Maglor, or Maedhros, had kept postponing the act of defining what he felt about them. And then it had been too late. He had realised too late, far too late, that that odd little family, himself, Elros, Maglor and Maedhros, had been exactly the family he had needed.

He sighed, and looked over what he had written. The ink was still damp on the last bars of the melody. He stared at the notes for a long while as if expecting them to yield some sort of insight, and then smiled. Maybe one day, when his own sons had been awakened by nightmares, he would sing them this lullaby. But for now Imladris was calm and silent as the dawn crept over the valley’s edge.

**Author's Note:**

> I think Maedhros had taught himself to think in Sindarin by this point, which is why I use Sindarin names for the parts from his point of view set in Middle Earth, but Quenya names for the parts set in Valinor.


End file.
